London region still tough sell for NDP

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Can the Orange Crush wash over Conservative-blue Southwestern Ontario this time?

Tom Mulcair tried to get a regional change in political colour schemes going Wednesday, Day 2 of the NDP leader’s area blitz that included his campaign debut in London, where he pitched a $40-million tax credit for manufacturers to bolster Ontario’s industrial heartland, parts of which are only now bouncing back from the after-effects of the brutal 2008 recession.

The NDP is making waves in the region, party insiders and outside observers say, but whether that’s enough to put more notches in the win column depends as much on taking away votes from the Liberals as it does from the Conservatives.

While the NDP seems to be maintaining a slim lead in early national polls, in a tight battle between the Big Three parties, its chances of breaking the Tories’ London-region grip, where the NDP won one of 10 ridings last time, rely on wrestling away the anti-Harper vote from the Liberals, says veteran political observer Nelson Wiseman.

This election — the longest in modern Canadian history, and little more than three weeks into an 11-week campaign — has become a referendum on the government, with a lot more strategic voting expected among those looking for the best way to keep the Conservatives from another win.

“The NDP has been leading the polls. They will make a breakthrough if there is a wave,” said Wiseman, a political scientist at the University of Toronto.

Wiseman said he expects the Tories, still sitting on a big campaign war chest, will switch their attack soon to narrow the field of battle as the Oct. 19 election draws closer and the stakes rise.

“They want to push the Liberals way back, so it becomes a two-way race, Then they turn the heavy artillery on Mulcair and the NDP,” he predicted.

In the 10-riding London region last time, the NDP ran second to the Conservatives in seven races and the Liberals in third, in some cases far behind. Only in two London ridings — London North Centre and London West — were the contests Conservative-Liberal clashes.

Veteran NDP campaigner Gina Barber, a former London civic politician managing the party’s London West campaign, said she’s convinced momentum is on the NDP’s side this time, with volunteers joining the campaign in droves in the same riding that sent a New Democrat, Peggy Sattler, to the Ontario legislature last year, leaving two of London’s three stand-alone provincial ridings in NDP hands.

Still, Barber said the rural ridings in the London region — where the NDP has never won a federal seat — may be a longer haul for the party, even though it finished second in so many races last time.

“Tradition is stronger in rural areas,” she said. “But the events of the last few years have shaken the faith in the Conservative Party and (voters) start looking for alternatives.”

A generation ago, under Jean Chretien, the Liberals owned the London region, with vote-splitting on the political right between the old Progressive Conservative and Reform parties allowing Liberals to walk up the middle and win seats with less than majority support.

Under Harper, the reverse has happened — only with the NDP and Liberals splitting the vote.

Whether the London region is ripe for stratetic voting, or anti-Conservative supporters rallying behind only one party, isn’t crystal-clear.

But one barometer, the Vote Together national campaign aimed at defeating Tory candidates, may be telling: It has only targeted one riding in the London region — London North Centre, a former Liberal bastion that the Conservatives only picked off in the last election.

The Conservatives are too far head in the other area ridings to justify running the strategic voting campaign, said Corrigan Hammond, a field organizer for Vote Together.

Still, he said, after nearly a decade of Harper in power, he’s picking up on growing voter desire in Southwestern Ontario for change.

“From Windsor to Hamilton, a lot of former Harper supporters are looking to park their vote somewhere else and that might benefit the NDP or the Liberals,” he said.

The good news for the NDP is that it’s running second in seven ridings surrounding London, displacing the Liberals as the alternative to the Tories, according to analysis by poll-aggregating website threehundredeight.com, which projects local races from national polls.

Still, in most cases in the region, the NDP is stilling running a distant second behind the Tories.

In London North Centre, Vote Together has the parties tightly bunched, with Liberal challenger Peter Fragistakos in a slight lead ahead of Conservative Susan Truppe, the MP in the last Parliament, and NDP candidate German Gutierrez. That underlines the need for strategic voting to allow Truppe to come up the middle, said Hammond.

Wednesday in London, with precision optical research equipment-maker Sciencetech his backdrop, Mulcair condemned the Harper government’s industrial strategy for focusing on the energy sector.

“Consecutive Liberal and Conservative governments have sat on the sidelines while half a million manufacturing jobs disappear,” he said.

The NDP’s proposed tax credit would help manufacturers buy machinery, equipment and property to promote research and development.

Mulcair noted London lost train locomotive-builder Electro-Motive Diesel (EMD) and its 460 jobs in 2012, despite the company receiving $5 million from the Harper government.

U.S. equipment giant Caterpillar, which bought and owned EMD through a subsidiary, moved the production to Indiana after a take-it or leave-it contract that would have slashed wages for many jobs at the plant.

“Stephen Harper showed up with a cheque and did a photo-op at the Electro-Motive Diesel plant,” said Mulcair, adding: “Those jobs were all shipped off to the United States with five million bucks.”

Mulcair also repeated his pledge an NDP government would deliver a balanced budget in his first year in office by raising taxes on big corporations and dropping the Harper government’s income-splitting plan.

He rejected Liberal leader Justin Trudeau’s claim the NDP would have to slash spending to balance the budget, saying the NDP’s first budget will be balanced.